Embodiments of the present invention include a system and method for sharing a device across operating systems. Industry standards have been developed to enhance compatibility between devices and operating systems. One such standard is the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface Specification (ACPI) version 2.0b that was developed to establish industry standard interfaces for operating systems.
The ACPI specification describes the interfaces between components, the contents of the ACPI System Description Tables, and the related semantics of the other ACPI components. The ACPI System Description Tables describe a particular platform's hardware and are at the heart of the ACPI implementation. The ACPI System Firmware is primarily used to supply the ACPI Tables. The Firmware includes an ACPI namespace. The namespace is hierarchical in nature and is used to refer to objects. The ACPI specification is an interface specification comprised of both software and hardware elements.
Sharing of objects between OSs has been done on a very low level, and is not true sharing. Moreover, the limited sharing that does take place is typically proprietary to the specific OS and/or OS family, such as for example, OpenVMS. In an OpenVMS system, the firmware slices up the memory before the server boots. The first OS that boots builds a data structure called a global configuration tree. In this system, a kernel can access portions of the memory, however accessing the portions of memory require lock bits and locking algorithms. While such a system has a shared memory data structure that has a tree semantic, it is has a very low level of sharing and requires software and firmware that is revision locked and not separately releasable.